Active and Passive Components for Broadband Transmit Phased Arrays: Broadband Transmit Front-End Components

Phased-array antennas have penetrated a large application space, and in this article, we present some of the critical components for phased-array front ends, as described in
Figure 1
. We focus on an octave-bandwidth 6- to 12-GHz transmit implementation, but the methodology and component designs are scalable in frequency. Over the past few decades, phased-array applications have expanded from radar to wireless and satellite communications, as well as medical imaging and various sensing modalities. By tracking users with individual high-gain beams, spatial multiplexing enables cochannel interference mitigation, enhancing signal levels, and power management in wireless communications systems. For example,
[1]
shows a 64-element phased-array transceiver operating in the 28-GHz band with 52-dBm effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) for 5G applications with up to 12 Gb/s of throughput, and
[2]
demonstrates a system-level development of a 384-element, 16-tile, W-band phased array with 52-dBm EIRP in 0.18-μm silicon–germanium bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) technology. In satellite broadcasting and communication systems, phased-array antennas enable beam shaping over countries and continents, tracking at the end-user side, and rain fading mitigation, e.g.,
[3]
. In
[4]
, advances in phased arrays for satellite applications developed at Lockheed Martin are described from an industry perspective.